29 January 2009

Why They Hate Us


1,073,741,824. One billion plus.

This is the number of ancestors you had, theoretically, approximately 600 years ago, sometime around 1400. How did I arrive at this figure? Simple: you have two parents, each of them has two parents (4), each of them has two parents (8), each of them has two parents (16), and so on for approximately 30 generations (@20yrs).

But there's a problem. According to the best available estimates, at that time there were only about 350,000,000 people alive. Three-hundred-fifty million, slightly more than one-third of the number of your theoretical ancestors. "Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived." Or so says Steve Olson in an article published several years back in The Atlantic Monthly: "The Royal We." What gives?

Intermarriage, intermingling of family trees, etc. Fine. Yet, there is a mathematical issue.
"In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," [Joseph] Chang [a statistician] showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today."
Everyone today who has any trace of European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne (the Holy Grail, if you will, of genealogical research). And Muhammad: "The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist," says Olson.

Further, as a matter of statistical certainty, everyone alive today is descended from Abraham and David and Confuscius and Nefertiti:
"the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors."
So, how does it feel to have royal, even divine blood? Feels pretty good, doesn't it? It gives you a real sense of self-esteem, n'est pas? A sense of pride and confidence. Even a sense of privilege. And that's the problem. This February 12th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) offended everyone who felt they had a drop of noble blood because at some level nobility is associated with divinity.

Throughout the history of Western civilization, royalty embellished their claims to rule over others by tracing their ancestral roots to the gods. Today's most blatant example is the Pope of the Roman Catholic sect who claims his authority comes from Peter, to whom Jesus the Divine purportedly gave the keys of heaven: "Behold he [Peter] received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing is committed to him, the care of the whole Church and its government is given to him [cura ei totius Ecclesiae et principatus committitur (Epist., lib. V, ep. xx, in P.L., LXXVII, 745)].

Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code plays on this myth of divine sanction, articulating the counter-myth that Charlemagne was the direct physical descendant of Jesus through the line of Mary Magdalene—which claim, of course, is a direct challenge to the spiritual authority arrogated to itself by the Roman church. Prior to this, the Roman Emperors, of course, formalized the model, relying heavily on the divine sanction for their authority. The Divine Augustus, the apotheosis of Nero, etc.

Jesus, as far as I can tell, was the first commoner/plebeian/peasant to be claimed to be a direct divine descendant; and, in the eyes of much of the Christian church, this elevated him to royalty. King Jesus. But this is confusing. In the New Testament, the books of Matthew and Luke make some attempt to trace Jesus's genealogy back through Joseph to David and, thus, Abraham and even Adam; but that makes no sense if his "father" was the Holy Spirit of God and not the icky, spermy Joseph. Either Jesus had a divine ancestor, arguably, in Adam, the first man, or Jesus's lineage represented a break in the chain of ancestry as the divine acted directly in the womb of his mother, Mary.

The tradition, of course, is much older, however. The Greek gods were continually meddling in the affairs of mortals and begetting spawn who were destined to rule over the people. There's a long history in the ancient Near East, as well. The so-called 'Divine Right of Kings' was but a modern shadow of the persistence of this myth.

Suffice it to say: Nobility, Royalty, Divinity: they are all inextricably intertwined in Western history. It can be quite confusing to us poor non-elites. 'Divinity' mythologizes the right of one person or one group to hold sway over another group. 'Divinity' authorizes rulership.

Then, along came Darwin. His work smashed this myth, waking humanity from its great slumber of irreality. There are truly no divine origins, no divinely sanctioned royalty, no exclusive nobility. We all have the same origins. We are all, in essence, of the animal kingdom. Human, all too human. It is the great disillusionment.

And 150 years later, the Christers, primarily, are fighting a fierce, rear-guard action defending the primacy of their great delusion. They need to believe that the authority of their priests, ministers, preachers, etc. derives directly from some higher power; that some divinity deigned to appear on earth and interfere in human affairs by impregnating a young Hebrew girl; that the presence of this divinity among us was revealed exclusively to a selective few, bestowing upon them some form of spiritual authority over the rest of us; that this authority has been handed down in an unbroken chain of succession ever since; and that the stories surrounding this revelation are set down in holy writ and, if we read them aright (the way the authorities tell us to), it will be revealed to us in all its glory. Magical thinking, that.

Darwin detached that chain at the source, demolished the feigned origins of authority (divine AND secular) and nobility. That is why they hate us.

4 comments:

Richard said...

This is a fascinating post, Jim. But I think your conclusion is mistaken. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "they" or "us" or even "Christers". Is the latter just "Christians"? Or fundamentalists? Who is engaging in this "rear-guard action"? Christians? Fundamentalists? Rank-and-file Christians, or the church powers?

You're right, of course, that Darwin's work changed the game. Justifications for church power and certain specifics of belief have been challenged and threatened. But there's a lot more to it than that.

There is an odd self-congratulatory mode atheists have when it comes to religion. I've had it myself. We're too smart for it, we can see through it. Fine, sure. But I don't know that it does us any favors. In any event, I think there are compelling reasons to believe that, without religion, we never would have become culturally human (see, for example, Chris Knight). In addition, it could be argued that religion, Christianity in particular, the expansion of certain aspects of its authority (as a church), play major roles in the move toward rationalism (see Peter Brown).

People are religious for various reasons, rarely because they've examined the content of a religion and decided this or that one's beliefs make sense. But they will defend that content in weird ways, if they feel besieged. The religious people who seem scary to us, what's scary about them, or rather, what's made them resort to scariness, are events in the socio-political realm. I think those of us who are not religious would be better served thinking about things in such terms.

Jim H. said...

Richard,

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I've been reading your blog for quite a lot longer than I've been posting. You pose salient questions that go the clarity of my post. Let me respond:

In broad general strokes, 'Us' refers to humanists—a recent theme here. Valuing fact and evidence and verifiable truth are key components.

I've made it clear over the last year of posting (and there's no reason for you to have known this), I am not an atheist. I am agnostic. This post is a bit of a follow-up to a science and theology post I did back in November. You can find it by clicking on "Anselm" in the Topics list, if you're interested. It's called "The Big Picture."

Though I get what they're doing, I am turned off by the evangelism and absolutism of Hitchens and Dawkins, et al.—but particularly Hitchens. Frankly, I think it takes a certain amount of 'faith' to hold there is no 'god'. In "The Big Picture" post, I make what I take to be a rational case for something that could be considered 'god-like'. On my view, theology is not necessarily a bankrupt project. That doesn't necessarily make me a theist, however.

My view is arguably early Wittgentsteinian: if you don't know, don't say. And I don't know. To believe is folly—hell, Jesus the divine said that. Faith, as Kierkegaard, says is a gift. It takes a leap beyond the limits of knowledge and rationality I am not willing to make.

I don't know either Chris Knight or Peter Brown, but I know how to use Google.

I agree that much that passes for religion is merely social and political associating and, as with the prominent atheists, it is their radical evangelizing and baseless absolutism that bothers me.

The point I was driving at in the o.p.—however poorly—was that Darwin introduced a radically democratic world-view that threatened the secular as well as sacred structures of authority by undermining their (super-naturally sanctioned) claims to nobility and superiority. There is no political order ordained by god. And this was a threat.

By analogy, we all saw how the Bush Republicans (and Reaganites to a lesser extent) pwned the evangelicals in this country in recent years: campaigning as their ally and friend, sucking up to their spiritual authority, as a means to obtain their votes, get elected, and maintain power, but abandoning them when they no longer needed them. Conservative forces in society (by this I mean those who long for some semblance of the by-gone era of royalty and nobility) use the church (often a witting fool) to wage this rear-guard action against the forces of radical social democratizing wrought by Darwin.

I don't know if this is any clearer, but I assure you it will not be my last post on this topic. The idea is a big one, a challenging one, and there is no room in it for imprecision. Thanks.

Best,
Jim H.

Jim H. said...

Richard,

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I've been reading your blog for quite a lot longer than I've been posting. You pose salient questions that go the clarity of my post. Let me respond:

In broad general strokes, 'Us' refers to humanists—a recent theme here. Valuing fact and evidence and verifiable truth are key components.

I've made it clear over the last year of posting (and there's no reason for you to have known this), I am not an atheist. I am agnostic. This post is a bit of a follow-up to a science and theology post I did back in November. You can find it by clicking on "Anselm" in the Topics list, if you're interested. It's called "The Big Picture."

Though I get what they're doing, I am turned off by the evangelism and absolutism of Hitchens and Dawkins, et al.—but particularly Hitchens. Frankly, I think it takes a certain amount of 'faith' to hold there is no 'god'. In "The Big Picture" post, I make what I take to be a rational case for something that could be considered 'god-like'. On my view, theology is not necessarily a bankrupt project. That doesn't necessarily make me a theist, however.

My view is arguably early Wittgentsteinian: if you don't know, don't say. And I don't know. To believe is folly—hell, Jesus the divine said that. Faith, as Kierkegaard, says is a gift. It takes a leap beyond the limits of knowledge and rationality I am not willing to make.

I don't know either Chris Knight or Peter Brown, but I know how to use Google.

I agree that much that passes for religion is merely social and political associating and, as with the prominent atheists, it is their radical evangelizing and baseless absolutism that bothers me.

The point I was driving at in the o.p.—however poorly—was that Darwin introduced a radically democratic world-view that threatened the secular as well as sacred structures of authority by undermining their (super-naturally sanctioned) claims to nobility and superiority. There is no political order ordained by god. And this was a threat.

By analogy, we all saw how the Bush Republicans (and Reaganites to a lesser extent) pwned the evangelicals in this country in recent years: campaigning as their ally and friend, sucking up to their spiritual authority, as a means to obtain their votes, get elected, and maintain power, but abandoning them when they no longer needed them. Conservative forces in society (by this I mean those who long for some semblance of the by-gone era of royalty and nobility) use the church (often a witting fool) to wage this rear-guard action against the forces of radical social democratizing wrought by Darwin.

I don't know if this is any clearer, but I assure you it will not be my last post on this topic. The idea is a big one, a challenging one, and there is no room in it for imprecision. Thanks.

Best,
Jim H.

Richard said...

Hi Jim - thanks for your reply. I should say that when I wrote "I think your conclusion is mistaken", I felt at the time that the final word was too harsh (I'd had "wrong" but had already changed it). What I really meant was that I felt unease when reading your conclusion.

I also felt a sense of uneasiness after re-reading your previous post that you referred me to. There is much that I agree with there, but much that troubles me, which I'm having difficulty articulating. The topic requires that I spend some more time with it before saying much else. It may well end up as a post on my own blog. (And some of what I'd say, I may already have said there, somewhere!)

However, I was going to say, and leave it at that, that I do consider myself an atheist, not because I know there's no God, but because I see it as meaning that I believe there is no God, so to speak. You're right that we can't know, of course (hence you opt for "agnostic"). But your reference to "faith" as a gift, per Kierkegaard, forces me to say more. I usually object when someone says that atheism is a faith just as much as theism. But in the sense that it's true that I lack the "gift" of faith, in the Kierkegaardian sense, I find it interesting to think that I have the gift of non-faith in God. That is, my non-belief is matter of faith, but in the sense that it simply is. It's not based a on rational assessment of the religious question. I simply don't have faith, or I have the faith of non-faith. (And this is the area in which at least one of my objections to Dawkins, et al, arises.)

That's all I can say at the moment. Thanks.

(FYI, I've posted a few times about Chris Knight's work,
here.)